If not today, when?
Remember, remember, the 23rd of November? The backhoe, the rebellion and plot? I know of no reason why the Ampatuan massacre should ever be forgot. (Paraphrased from V for Vendetta)
Goya’s art, like Dostoyevsky’s, seems a turning point in the history of moral feeling and of sorrow — as deep, as original, as demanding. With Goya, a new standard for responsiveness to suffering enters art. The account of of war’s cruelties is fashioned as an assault on the sensibility of the viewer. (Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others)
The backhoe took on such insidious meaning last November that many people shuddered when it came along again in photographs two months later, this time crating around dead bodies after the Haiti quake. In the wake of our own tragedy, we clamored for justice, pinned black twibbons on avatars and rocked along the riles, demanding complete accountability from our leaders. But in a total perversion of his domain, Sec. Agra dropped murder charges against two members of the implicated clan, highlighting once again the obscene relationship the administration has with powerful warlords, and foreshadowing a coming election rife with fraud, at the very least. It is quite apt that artist Wawi Navarroza’s photograph Not Today, a paraphrase of Francisco Goya’s painting The Third of May, 1808 conflated with the familiar, shocking Maguindanao images that made the rounds of the front pages and Facebook, should be released at this time.
Staged on an open field, with beautiful mountains rolling in the background, symbols of civil society — from businessmen, teachers, starlets, and farmers, to nurses, children, rastafarians, and of course, photographers and journalists — are held at gunpoint, some fallen, wounded, dead, others crying, praying, surrendering. Patches of red dribble down some of the shirts, but not enough to bleed the grass. The gunmen, dressed in fatigues and scarves, suggest both terrorists and soldiers (a private army of hipsters perhaps). The image is arresting, because it dares recreate a recent atrocity as a tableau vivant, and we can read it as a straight-up statement against political violence, or we can see the campy horror in the models’ dramatic poses, and rue to ourselves once more how our politics resembles, and always has, a never-ending rerun of the telenovela of the damned.
“That this photograph seems to be parading the Theater of the Absurd is nothing different to the absurdity of massacre, war, atrocity and violence,” Navarroza explains. “People have died for pointless reasons, the ‘senseless’ killings (is there a sensible killing?), the blood-stained election votes.” She designed the piece to function in different contexts: gallery, billboard, and commercial. In a gallery setting, the work becomes political art, in the same way that Goya’s The Disasters of War were meant to “awaken, shock, wound the viewer,” as Sontag writes. We start calling on those other harrowing images that Not Today is a synthesis of, and we are made aware of our forgetting.
To see Not Today as a billboard along EDSA will have much different effects, however; nestled between skin-whitening elixirs, bowls of instant pancit, and 50-foot Kris Aquinos, it could get lost in the bombardment of banal advertising messages, or it could stand out, controversially, with its unpleasant reminders and dirtied clothes among a sequence of airbrushed bodies and shiny vitamin C endorsers. It may even cause a few accidents, as any image worth looking at should be accorded more than just a drive-by glance (hence the predominance of famous faces — they’re the large-scale visual equivalent of a tweet, 140 characters or less, easy to read).
Yet as a commercial — and it is a commercial— Not Today will be drained of most of its power. Cherie Paris watches are the sponsors behind the “Enough Blood on the Ballot” advocacy. Though it may have been conceived with the best of intentions, the collaboration is an awkward, even offensive one. Retailers of time should be careful about becoming retellers of history, and to slap a logo on an image that undeniably references the 23rd of November is akin to saying they own the event and are capitalizing on it, with a cavalier attitude toward the pain of others. Equally confounding is that the website (www.urbantime.com.ph/itsabouttime/) encourages you to sign a petition against electoral violence. That’s like starting a signature campaign denouncing world hunger or child abuse. Everyone is against abstract evil concepts, of course, but if no concrete action is going to result from from it, it’s little more than a PR exercise. I suspect the sign-ups go straight to the same place where they collect e-mail addresses for newsblasts and other spam. You will, however, receive a free gift from Cherie Paris, redeemable at all Urban Time outlets nationwide.
